[REVIEW] Robert Glück's Margery Kempe
Sep. 10th, 2005 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI first learned of The Book of Margery Kempe when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tudor_rose enthused about it, one day after class in the halcyon days at the end of the second millennium. An autobiography of sorts, perhaps written as part of an effort to make this mystic a saint, this 15th century text described the woman Margery Kempe and her efforts to alternatively gain recognition and protection for her passionate mystic devotion to Jesus Christ. I remember one professor in Chaucer class talking about how Kempe's relationship with Jesus attained erotic dimensions (her desire for a union with the Christ, her renunciation of sex with her husband for a higher union with God's son on Earth). This erotic attachment to Jesus, she said, was actually a common trope o many female mystics in medieval Europe, a way for them to combine their sexual longings and their desire for an unmediated experience of Christianity.
After I picked up a copy of Robert Glück's 1994 novel Margery Kempe and began reading, I found that Glück began from Kempe's eroticization of Jesus. His slim book intertwines two narratives, one a retelling of Kempe's life story by a modern author, the other the same author's recounting of his own lust for the young man L. The two stories blur together, fused by the author's recognition that he and Margery both long for someone forever just beyond reach, that they both are striving for a mystic union manifested tangibly and physically.
Weeks after finishing Margery Kempe, I'm still not sure what I think of it. Reviewers elsewhere have criticized the book for its allegedly inauthentic description of a woman's psychology and its modernization of Jesus, but the author's portraits of these two people likely should be biased. There are such things as unreliable narrators, after all. Glück's style of writing--"experimental," playful, erratic, almost stream of consciousness--is the sticking point for me. In fiction, I prefer conservative styles of narration--Madame Bovary comes quickly to mind as a favourite. I can readily enter into and enjoy novels written in relatively traditional styles; I can't do nearly so well with more recent styles. Whether this is a fault in the reader or the writer, I leave to a third party. I certainly can't say that I didn't enjoy Margery Kempe, or even that I wouldn't recommend it. I just don't know how strongly I'd agitate for it.
tudor_rose enthused about it, one day after class in the halcyon days at the end of the second millennium. An autobiography of sorts, perhaps written as part of an effort to make this mystic a saint, this 15th century text described the woman Margery Kempe and her efforts to alternatively gain recognition and protection for her passionate mystic devotion to Jesus Christ. I remember one professor in Chaucer class talking about how Kempe's relationship with Jesus attained erotic dimensions (her desire for a union with the Christ, her renunciation of sex with her husband for a higher union with God's son on Earth). This erotic attachment to Jesus, she said, was actually a common trope o many female mystics in medieval Europe, a way for them to combine their sexual longings and their desire for an unmediated experience of Christianity.After I picked up a copy of Robert Glück's 1994 novel Margery Kempe and began reading, I found that Glück began from Kempe's eroticization of Jesus. His slim book intertwines two narratives, one a retelling of Kempe's life story by a modern author, the other the same author's recounting of his own lust for the young man L. The two stories blur together, fused by the author's recognition that he and Margery both long for someone forever just beyond reach, that they both are striving for a mystic union manifested tangibly and physically.
Weeks after finishing Margery Kempe, I'm still not sure what I think of it. Reviewers elsewhere have criticized the book for its allegedly inauthentic description of a woman's psychology and its modernization of Jesus, but the author's portraits of these two people likely should be biased. There are such things as unreliable narrators, after all. Glück's style of writing--"experimental," playful, erratic, almost stream of consciousness--is the sticking point for me. In fiction, I prefer conservative styles of narration--Madame Bovary comes quickly to mind as a favourite. I can readily enter into and enjoy novels written in relatively traditional styles; I can't do nearly so well with more recent styles. Whether this is a fault in the reader or the writer, I leave to a third party. I certainly can't say that I didn't enjoy Margery Kempe, or even that I wouldn't recommend it. I just don't know how strongly I'd agitate for it.
